SEMrush Review: The Best All-Encompassing SEO Tool?

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If you’re looking for the best way to manage your SEO strategy, stop what you’re doing and read our SEMrush review right now! SEMrush is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market, largely because it does a lot — and does it all well. We highly recommend this tool if you want to take your site’s competitive edge to the highest level. In fact, it garnered the top spot in our annual SEO Tools Review. Keep reading to see all the ways SEMrush can help you boost your website’s traffic and rankings.

Great for competitor evaluation – track keyword position changes, traffic values, and more.

Speedy! The data loads quickly, unlike some competing services.

While we appreciate SEMrush’s Keyword Difficulty tool, we’ve found it places too much emphasis on total Google results instead of exact results (see here for explanation), perhaps making some keywords less difficult than their rating indicates.

There are also custom SEMrush plans if there isn’t a stock product that works perfectly for you. For example, if you just want to add another session (simultaneous login) or user, you can pay for this a la carte.

SEMrush Key Features

You can get overwhelmed with SEMrush at first because it’s so feature rich. But it’s worth it in the end! Here’s a fairly brief (we could go on and on) overview of this tool’s main features.

SEMrush Site Audit

You can boost your website’s SEO success using several SEMrush tools. The general Audit feature gives you stats on your current organic and paid searches, backlink performance, etc. SEMrush also has an excellent SEO Ideas tool that offers you specific insights and suggestions on areas that could use improvement. And their Brand Monitoring tool lets you track, measure and adjust how people are viewing your brand.

Competitor Analysis

Competitive analysis is where SEMrush stands out from the pack. SEMrush gives you powerful information on who your competing websites are and how they’re performing. You can see data about their top keywords, display advertising, link building, paid and organic searches and how they’re doing in rankings. You can manually enter your competitors, but SEMrush also analyzes your keywords and finds competitors you didn’t know existed.

SEMrush Keyword Research

SEMrush takes keyword research to a deeper level and lets you play with the big boys — websites that rank in Google’s and Bing’s top results. Along with the basic data, like CPC and volume, you’ll also get information on keyword difficulty, trends, the number of results, SERP features and more for every queried keyword, including long tail keywords.

In the cons above we distinguish between “total” and “exact” Google search results – this simply means if you type a keyword phrase into Google using quotes (“we rock your web”), it will provide the exact number of results for that phrase. We’ve found this value is more useful in calculating how competitive a phrase is than the large number of results that’s returned when you don’t use quotes (ie. you type in ‘we rock your web’ without quotes).

Link Building

You can do some serious backlink research with SEMrush to help you boost your website’s reputation on the Internet. SEMrush gives you insights into how authoritative a referring domain is and where it’s located. You’ll also be able to see if each backlink is a follow or no follow link. And SEMrush allows you to see how your competitors backlinks are performing. SEMrush recently launched a backlink audit tool that helps you find toxic links so you can easily disavow with Google’s Search Console.

Social Media

SEMrush’s Social Media tool helps you easily manage and boost your social media marketing campaigns. You can get simple or detailed reports on your social audience, their activity, user engagement and more. And you can get all of this data for your competitors’ social media efforts as well.

Want to See SEMrush in Action?

Check out the video below for an overview of SEMrush’s easy interface and visually engaging platform.

How Do Users Weigh in on SEMrush?

Here’s a sampling of user feedback we’ve found on SEMrush. A vast majority of customer reviews around the web are overwhelmingly positive about SEMrush.

Positive SEMrush Review

Our team lives and breathes within SEMrush for helping discover keyword opportunities for a full taxonomy build out based on competing domains, and for pulling individual page insights against competing page-level URLs for content optimization. However, our favorite feature is the dashboard insights that help us understand paid, organic and high level traffic estimates. With Keyword Planner moving to broad ranges, smaller businesses simply can’t live without the data SEMrush is able to collect. — Steve W., G2Crowd 12/29/2016

Negative SEMrush Review

The pro package which is the least expensive package does not include white labels and branding. It just doesn’t make sense why the base model would not include this basic feature that most SEO tools I’ve used include by default. — User in IT, G2Crowd 1/7/2017

What’s Our Final Word With SEMrush?

It may take a little while for you to get used to ALL the robust features SEMrush offers, but once you dive deeper into this tool, you won’t be disappointed. We are confident that SEMrush is a great all-in-one tool for any SEO marketer (confident because we use and pay for it ourselves as our primary SEO tool). If you’re still on the fence, be sure to learn more in our interview with CEO Oleg Shchegolev and check out SEMrush alternatives in our Best SEO Tools article.

Sally has coupled her passion for writing with her (slight) obsession for the latest high tech gadgets. While she’s not daydreaming about the beach, she’s taking advantage of all the activities her hometown has to offer in the Blue Ridge foothills.

Yes, I use Semrush and it is invaluable for my needs. The three biggest areas I use it are for keyword research for new articles, position tracking to see how my main keywords are doing (and seeing my competitors as well) and the site audit. The audit tool is amazing for finding broking links, images and other seo issues that I normally wouldn’t know about.